• If the current antibiotics fail, then simple infections were easily treated, such as skin and throat infections, will become life threatening.
• Almost all the new antibiotics that have been brought to market in recent decades are variations of antibiotic drugs classes that had been discovered by the 1980s.
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The world is woefully unprepared to deal with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the World Health Organization warns in a new report.
The WHO says although resistance to antibiotics is a known and certain danger—the global level of preparedness does not match the magnitude of the threat.
The organisation said all of the current antibiotics in the market are slowly failing and none of the 43 different drugs currently in clinical development sufficiently address the problem of drug resistance in the world’s most dangerous bacteria.
If the current antibiotics fail, then simple infections were easily treated, such as skin and throat infections, will become major killers.
Already, superbug infections such as drug-resistant TB kill thousands of people a year around the world, and the trend is growing.
“The persistent failure to develop, manufacture, and distribute effective new antibiotics is further fueling the impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and threatens our ability to successfully treat bacterial infections,” said Dr Hanan Balkhy, WHO assistant director general on antimicrobial resistance.
The current trend of resistance is driven by misuse of antibiotics, especially in farming.
Almost all the new antibiotics that have been brought to market in recent decades are variations of antibiotic drugs classes that had been discovered by the 1980s.
The impact of AMR is most severe in resource-constrained settings and among vulnerable groups such as newborns and young children.
Bacterial pneumonia and bloodstream infections are among the major causes of childhood mortality under the age of five.
About 30 per cent of neonates with sepsis die because of bacterial infections resistance to multiple first-line antibiotics.
WHO’s annual Antibacterial Pipeline Report 2020 reviews antibiotics that are in the clinical stages of testing as well as those in early product development.
The aim is to assess progress and identify gaps in relation to urgent threats of drug resistance, and to encourage action to fill those gaps.
The 2020 report reveals a near static pipeline with only few antibiotics being approved by regulatory agencies in recent years.
Most of these agents in development offer limited clinical benefit over existing treatments, with 82 per cent of the recently approved antibiotics being derivatives of existing antibiotic classes with well-established drug-resistance. Therefore, rapid emergence of drug-resistance to these new agents is expected.
The review concludes that “overall, the clinical pipeline and recently approved antibiotics are insufficient to tackle the challenge of increasing emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance”.
The report notes that there are some promising products in different stages of development. However, only a fraction of these will ever make it to the market due to the economic and inherent scientific challenges in the drug development process.